Documentary of Ed Koch opens hours after ex-mayor dies

Now this seems to be creepy karma, but Ed Koch wouldn’t have it any other way.

Hours after the former mayor of New York City died of congestive heart failure, former Wall Street Journal reporter Neil Barksy’s documentary on Koch opened in New York City theaters.

“Former Mayor Ed Koch is the quintessential New Yorker. Still ferocious, charismatic, and hilariously blunt, the now 88-year-old Koch ruled New York from 1978 to 1989—a down-and-dirty decade of grit, graffiti, near-bankruptcy and rampant crime,” a press release the JTA received last month reads of documentary’s description.

The documentary goes through the life of Koch, who had plenty of chutzpah to spare, as he went through his 1977 competitive election, the 1980 transit strike, dealing with the AIDS epidemic, and an irreparable municipal corruption scandal. The film will also be shown at the Hartford Jewish Film festival, and will open in theaters in LA in March.

Also, another creepy thing to note… today is the anniversary of the death of Wall Street Journal reporter, Daniel Pearl who was beheaded in Pakistan in 2002. Sharing the same date of death, Koch’s tombstone has the following quote from Pearl, which were his last words before he was beheaded, “My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish, I’m a Jew.”

Koch’s tombstone also has a Jewish star of David as well as a sentence from Shema… a proud Jew till the very end.